Zero Dark Thirty (2012) - Combo Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

by Angelo Muredda As of this writing, the latest wannabe tastemaker to
thumb his nose at Zero Dark Thirty is novelist and
professional blowhard Bret Easton Ellis, who
tweeted that critics
lauding the film "need to admit that they're admiring a morally
indefensible movie." With that, Ellis joins an army of self-deputized film
writers who've taken issue on moral grounds with Kathryn Bigelow and Mark
Boal's treatment of the CIA's decade-spanning manhunt for Osama bin Laden. While Ellis's tasteless tweets about Bigelow's appearance a few weeks back
make his word suspect, it's harder to dismiss Glenn Greenwald, the liberal
firebrand whose initial survey of early praise for the film (then unseen by him) slammed Bigelow and Boal for glorifying torture. Incensed by the suggestion that crowd-sourcing knowledge about Zero Dark Thirty's representation of torture from the
likes of David Edelstein constituted poor form, Greenwald soon saw the picture for
himself and insisted that the viewing
only confirmed his initial impressions: "[T]o depict X as valuable in enabling the killing
of bin Laden is - by definition - to glorify X," he observed, where X
meant torture; woe to the "huge numbers of American viewers" about to
be "led" down the filmmakers' dim alleyways.

I mention this fracas at the start because I suspect
that whether the voices chattering about the film's morality from here on out
are as respected as Greenwald's or as, yes, morally dubious as
Ellis's, Zero Dark Thirty will for a long
time be defined by meta-discussions about intentionality and reception. The
tendency in this kind of thinking is to treat the movie as an essay, divining
its inscrutable argument through sketchy logical formulas that lead from
"depiction" (whatever that entails) to "glorification"
(ditto), then pinning the weight of a hypothetical audience's misreading of the
gap between those poles on the filmmakers. These commentators are coming from
an odd place, skirting as they do from moral indictments of irresponsible
artists to jeremiads about the fate of untrained readers in the absence of
straightforward authors. Bigelow and Boal can't win: They're either
propagandists or something much more sinister--postmodernists. The author is
dead; long live the author. By design, then, the film's reticence to behave
like a good expository essay and foreground its thesis has destined it to be a
lightning rod for ethical debates about the methods used to find and kill bin
Laden, not so much for what the movie says as for the way its formal silence on the
efficacy of those methods could leave viewers to their own interpretive
devices, God help them.

Reading these responses, you'd be forgiven for
thinking that Zero Dark Thirty was an auto-piloted
political ad rather than a taut procedural shepherded by one of the sharpest
living directors of process. "[If] this is high-minded 'art,'"
Greenwald opined with all the affected regular Joe philistinism of an
NYU-trained Doctor of Laws, "then anything produced by turning on a camera
is." Although this characterization of Bigelow as an amateur videographer
on the level of the sociopathic teens from Project X is
undoubtedly insulting, you could grant that Greenwald has incidentally put his
finger on her aesthetic, an unfussy sort of functionalism that, coupled with screenwriter Boal's matter-of-fact dialogue, strives for the unmoved air of investigative
journalism. Her steady procession of medium shots hence substitutes for sturdy
reportorial prose.

But Bigelow's unostentatious style isn't prosaic for
the sake of it. Rather, the mechanical accumulation of data in service of
national revenge--and the ugliness it masks--is the subject of her latest, in
line with a filmography preoccupied with the procedural
ends to which violence is put. Much has already been made of the stark contrast
between Zero Dark Thirty's opening shot--a black screen accompanied by the sounds of
frantic 911 calls on September 11--and what follows, the brutal water-boarding
of high-ranking al-Qaeda member Anmar (Reda Kateb) by frat boy interrogator Dan
(Jason Clarke) and junior agent Maya (Jessica Chastain), our eventual
protagonist. Far from claiming that the latter scene is unambiguous payback for
the former, however, the juxtaposition emphasizes the barbaric actions that
undergird fruitless intelligence efforts to bracket the blank chaos of those
distress calls with the certainty of bin Laden's dead body or, in its stead,
the abused bodies of his surrogates. Much of the useful information that leads
to bin Laden is thanks to Maya's handy way around a classified envelope and
dartboard, her eerie aptitude at multitasking important phone calls with the
video of drone strikes that flickers across her monitor in one uneasy moment. Still,
it's the torture scenes that have most resonated with early commentators--in
part, I want to suggest, because they're the grotesque foundation of the
statistical enterprise Maya is engaged in throughout: finding a paper trail
that ends in a corpse.

By that token, Zero Dark
Thirty is no more a glorification of torture than Melville's Moby-Dick
is a defense of the brutality of whaling or Atwood's Alias Grace is a
pamphlet for nineteenth-century pseudo-science. Whether it produces valuable
information in Maya's eventual discovery of bin Laden's courier or not (and for the record, it doesn't), torture's presence in the film is a token of an
overwhelming lack: the absence of an intelligible and efficacious way of
putting the lid on the ghosts of 9/11, which licenses the most humiliating
corporeal punishments. What's most troubling about the picture, then, isn't its
triumphal progression towards bin Laden, but the eerie hint that the
"advanced interrogation techniques" (so the euphemism goes), obsessive
data collection, and night raids that comprised that narrative were all
inevitable--a powerful military nation's inexact translation of trauma into
process, or one system's retaliation against another through paperwork that
begins and ends with maimed bodies.

If there's a serious flaw here, it's in Boal's flat
characterization of Maya, who has to serve as our audience surrogate as well as
an embodiment of both fieldwork gumption and its dark side: single-minded
impersonality. Chastain is fine, but there's a dramaturgical archness to the
way Maya is penciled in largely through other characters' expository
pronouncements about her--"Washington says she's a killer,"
"It's her against the world"--or by anthropological totems like a
coffee mug with "OMG" on it. Though the film's reluctance to
editorialize about why the raid on bin Laden's compound is strictly a kill
mission is welcome, its depiction of Maya as an origin-less supercomputer, a sort of Will
Hunting at the Pentagon, feels calculated, a way of facilitating maximum identification.

That's a problem partly because Zero Dark Thirty is otherwise
so aware of the ethical pitfalls of audience surrogacy. Clumsy as Greenwald's
attacks proved, his position was always going to be articulated, and for good
reason: There's no way to divorce a blow-by-blow account of a
nationally-sanctioned kill mission from politics. Whether Bigelow successfully
complicates that depiction through her play on perspective is up for debate.
She stages the Abbottabad raid as a rigorous first-person shooter, framed at
times by night-vision cameras mounted on the SEALS' helmets as they move
through a recreation of the cramped hallways and bedrooms where bin Laden,
renamed "UBL" and coded "Geronimo" in Navy parlance, was
gunned down along with his sons and one daughter-in-law.

Some will see the sheer
force of this set-piece as the epitome of fascist wish-fulfillment. Yet that
reading is too easy, eschewing both the banality of the execution--the SEALs
call out their prospective target's names before firing, in an eerie moment of
mutual recognition that recalls Ben Wheatley's Kill List--and the profound alienation of spectators who don't
want to go along for the ride. "I got Ibrahim through the door," one
SEAL tells his colleague, but of course we know that, having already assumed
his perspective. The strength of Zero Dark Thirty lies in the discomfort of that payoff and the
coda that follows, where Maya effectively gets the trophy to cap her
counter-Jihad, only to be flown back home on another mission, as ambiguous and
imprecise as the last one. Originally published: December 20, 2012.

THE BLU-RAY DISCby Bill ChambersZero Dark Thirty arrives on Blu-ray from Sony in the United States and eOne in
Canada. We received the latter version for review, but I feel confident in saying that
technically-speaking, the discs are identical--the major difference is in the
selection of startup trailers, which in Canada features titles from both The
Weinstein Company (Django Unchained, Silver Linings Playbook, and
Killing Them Softly) and Focus Features (The Place Beyond the Pines).
(Even the menu screens of the two releases are the same, excepting eOne's
inclusion of bilingual text.) The 1.85:1, 1080p transfer reflects a film
shot digitally, in 2K, with the ARRI Alexa: The image is cinematic if
borderline antiseptic at times; there are traces of noise that might be faux-grain,
but they're so few and far between I'm inclined to believe it's an artifact of
either the original photography or the Blu-ray compression. Dynamic range plummets
during the raid on Bin Laden's compound by vérité design--low-light
viewing is definitely advisable. Otherwise, both shadow and fine detail are
exemplary, and the deceptively blurry night-vision shots reveal specks of dirt
on the lens. Perhaps most crucially, the presentation honours all
the multifaceted shades that make up Jessica Chastain's fiery head of hair. The
attendant 5.1 DTS-HD MA track is a stunner. Paul N.J. Ottoson's sound editing
probably won the Oscar on the strength of the audio montages alone, but the mix
is consistently complex without becoming dense. Explosions rock the subwoofer,
while gunshots shred the comparative silence to ribbons. Best, neither dialogue
nor Alexandre Desplat's score is ever drowned out by the pyrotechnics.

Supplements consist of four featurettes, the
first and least substantial of which, "No Small Feat" (4 mins., HD),
gets the obligatory praise for director Kathryn Bigelow out of the way.
"The Compound" (9 mins., HD) finds screenwriter Mark Boal walking us
through the production's reconstruction of Bin Laden's hideout, erected on a
lot in Mexico. The set had no breakaway walls or air conditioning, providing
authenticity and human discomfort in equal measure. Mock video glitches detract
from the earnestness of this piece. "Geared Up" (7 mins., HD) is
about the SEALS training that actors like Chris Pratt and Joel Edgerton went
through and how the quest for verisimilitude extended to arming them with the
actual weapons used by elite special forces. Lastly, the awkwardly-titled
"Targeting Jessica Chastain" (5 mins., HD) contains some interesting
B-roll of Chastain consulting with Bigelow amid soundbites in which the actress not only compares the role of Maya, positively, to Jodie Foster's in The Silence of
the Lambs, but also pre-emptively mourns the comedown from this inevitable career
peak. The BD is bundled with DVD and Digital copies of Zero Dark Thirty.